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Sunday, December 14, 2014

Rise above fear

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. - Steve Jobs

I feel everyone goes through tough times in their life. There are times when you can't even see yourself living the next day. These are the times when we are gripped with fear. The fear over powers our mind and we lose all our motivation to move ahead. Though everyone faces these kind of fears there are only a few who overcome these fears and they are called winners.

If we will read about the successful people, like Sachin Tendulkar or Amitabh Bachchan, we will notice that they have also faced lots of troubles in their life but rose above their fears and achieved what they were actually meant to achieve. Every person who achieve success have at some point faced their fears and have won against them.

It was during 2012, when I was in my final year of Engineering, when I went through a phase where everything was going against me. I am actually someone who plans out most of the things well in advance so, I was really confident that I rarely had a chance to fail in the work which I do but life has it's own way of teaching things.

In early 2012, I met with an accident and it was hard for me to even get up from bed for more than a month. My work suffered badly and at the same time my studies. In few months time, some of my friends who were partners in the startup which we created left for some better avenues (according to them). I think I was a bit stubborn at that point and could let my dream just go down like that. I worked with whatever resources I had to sustain the startup for as long as I could till it met a fatal ending. We faced a financial crunch and we had to stop the working.

Interesting, I left a very lucrative job in one of the top IT companies to pursue my dream and when it didn't work out there were hundreds of people who criticized my decision. With time I learned that these people hardly mattered. These same people would have cheered me if my venture would have become successful.

The next few months were tough as I was psychologically broken, the physical injury from the accident hasn't healed and financially shattered. I got cut off from the world, closed all my social networking accounts and confined myself to my room.

It took me a lot of effort to even go for a job. I had to motivate myself everyday to wake up and do the everyday things. I had to inspire myself everyday to go to work and most importantly had to convince my self to believe that I will overcome this face and there will be better things to look forward to in life. I feel hope is a very important thing to have and if someone doesn't have hope, it becomes really hard for him to look forward to the next day.

The fear which I had is a very common kind of fear, fear of failure but in my case this was causing huge problems. My fear of failure was failure to live my life. I felt I have failed as a human being. People do many things in their college life but I just worked towards my dream. I made the right plans and even worked really hard on them but still something went wrong. The whole incident shattered my confidence.

To come out of that fear was a huge thing and I would lie if I would say that suddenly one day I woke up and I thought yes, now I am alright. Overcoming fear is also a gradual process. I worked on it everyday. I overcame it one step at a time. Over coming the financial problem was the first step as I just had to motivate myself to take one of good jobs that were on offer. This was the moment when I could actually say that I actually "Rise above fear".

Socially the same people who criticize your wrong step, start praising you the next moment. To bring back my physical health, it took me some time and a lot of effort as I gained lots of weight also. The most important hurdle to pass was the psychological hurdle. I think I overcame a part of it with some motivation and with some talks with my family but I left most of issues buried.

It was about half a year back when I started talking about these problems with one of the closest person in my life. I think people need that healing touch to get over the deepest wounds. I feel blessed that I could overcome my fears and rise over them.

2 comments:

Such an inspiring post! It is really not that easy to get up and act when life knocks us down badly and repeatedly. I am so glad that you could get over that bad phase and that you did not let the fear of failure conquer you. Lots of respect. Keep smiling :)